CRM Success Tips Blog

Before deciding on a new CRM, follow these steps to select the right CRM system that meets your requirements, enhances adoption, offers value to your users – and can provide a return on your investment. Research estimates that up to 70% of CRM systems fail to meet expectations – and a failed CRM implementation can be extremely costly, not just in terms of the financial expense, but also because of the costs in lost time – and credibility. Even more impactful: you don’t often get a second chance at CRM success. This means that it’s critical to select the right CRM system the first time. The good news is CRM success is

Are you considering a new CRM? Before deciding to purchase a new system, a better and more budget-friendly option may be to update and improve your current system and better utilize what you have. You may be familiar with “Love It or List It,” a popular HGTV show where a couple shows their current house to designer Hilary Farr and real estate agent David Visentin. Hilary redesigns parts of the home based on the desires and budget of the homeowners and oversees the renovations and construction. Meanwhile, David looks for real estate listings that meet the homeowners\' needs and budget and then tries to convince them to list their current house and buy a new

If your CRM performance is uneven or failing lately, you’ll probably find deficiencies in Communications, Training or Data Quality. Regular attention and resourcing will help.  Every organization strives to make their CRM deployment as smooth and painless as possible, but many get off to an unsteady start. Through our work with leading law and professional services firms over the years, we have found there are three key supports that must be in place to achieve real success with any new CRM implementation: Communications, Training and High-Quality Data. To visualize these, let’s use the time-tested, three-legged stool concept. A stool represents a solid platform that enables you to reach higher. Each leg is equally

If you’re still struggling with CRM adoption challenges, taking a “white glove” approach can help. Customize training for the attorneys’ specific needs, and ensure they’re getting value.  In our last post, we explored four essentials to help drive CRM adoption in your firm. Here are three more that are proven to help engage users and entice them to actually use CRM: Training Educate  your attorneys on best practices for using CRM to engage with their clients and contacts and show them how CRM will make that easier. Nudge them from being passive consumers of the data in the CRM to active contributors by making the connection for them between contributing and getting

Are your professionals using the CRM system? If not, it’s time for a new approach to gaining adoption. These tips can help your team see value and benefits in CRM - and may get them to use it.   CRM isn’t easy. There can be a lot of challenges – from selecting the right system to rolling it out effectively, to integration with other systems, to maintaining system data quality. But one of the most common – and critical - pain points experienced by most firms – and, in fact, most organizations - is low CRM adoption. In the past, CRM adoption was gauged by whether we could get a majority of the attorneys

If you want to avoid a last-minute holiday mailing fire drill, now’s the time to update contact records and holiday mailing lists. Follow these tips to clean up your data and validate emails. A happy holiday season starts with a clean mailing list. Whether your firm sends holiday greetings electronically or mails traditional paper cards, so much effort goes into this annual ritual – from decisions around format and design, whether to gift or not to gift, or maybe making a charitable donation. And let’s not forget that the wording of the greeting itself must be politically correct. It’s enough to make you dread the upcoming holiday season (or go looking for

All CRM contact records are not created equal. By segmenting contact data into manageable pieces, your data cleaning process will be more manageable, and you can better measure progress.  Have you ever heard the saying, “No man ever steps into the same river twice”? Because a river’s water is constantly flowing and changing, the water you step in today will be different from yesterday. The same is true for the data in your CRM system: people are constantly changing roles, relocating, retiring; companies are opening, closing, moving and merging. On top of that, new data isn\'t always entered correctly. As a result, a database with clean, correct information today will not necessarily

Do you want your professionals to use CRM to support their business development efforts? Provide some training to help them leverage CRM data, and show them the value and benefit they\'ll gain from it. Now that Enterprise Relationship Management (ERM) systems can be implemented to identify relationships and allow contact records to be created and updated in a CRM without additional work on the part of the professionals or their assistants, we have an added opportunity to redefine what a successful CRM implementation would look like. It seems like we have forever been defining CRM success in a Professional Services firm as adoption, aka the number of professionals who are “using” the